UPDATE: The image has been removed at the request of the studio. Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.
Fox has aroused our curiosity at its Comic-Con panel last night by opting not to include anything for Josh Trank’s upcoming Fantastic Four reboot, which finds Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Bell stepping into the key roles of Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic, Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman, Johnny Storm/The Human Torch and Ben Grimm/The Thing (respectively). However, we may get a few scoops out of the tentpole yet.
A new image (above) has hit the web, depicting what looks to be the the reference CGI bust of the Thing being used on Trank’s film. A mysterious Twitter account called @justifiedfilms, which has since been deleted, tweeted out the pic, which of course has been immortalized on the web. For those who don’t know, a reference bust is essentially a placeholder marker intended for the computer animators, who use it to then use to insert the actual CGI creation. What does this mean? Well, it looks like Bell is mo-capping the Thing, rather than getting inside a stupid costume (à la Michael Chiklis in the awful Fantastic Four films that preceded this one). That’s good news, to be sure.
I’m also digging even the way this bust looks – it’s more interesting and fully-formed than the Thing’s appearance in Fantastic Four or Rise of the Silver Surfer, as well as a lot less cheesy. Does it look like a Thing version of Bell, though? That’s a different story. I’d been wondering how the rather scrawny actor would be rendered in bulked-up Thing form, and it looks like Fantastic Four‘s visual effects team will be getting a work-out as far as that’s concerned. If the above image is what the Thing will look like on the big screen, I’m totally fine with that.
Anyway, Fantastic Four is shooting right now, with Toby Kebbell also in the cast as Doctor Doom, so I wouldn’t be too surprised if a pre-recorded appearance from Trank appeared at Comic-Con. But then again, the Fox panel was really the place we expected to see Fantastic Four, and it didn’t show up there, so maybe fanboys are just going to have to chew on the above image for the time being.
Trank’s film opens June 19th, 2015.